Bible Study

Bible study is not the same thing as Bible reading. If Bible reading is like raking for leaves, Bible study is like digging for diamonds. The Christian life calls for both.

When we study the Bible, we are on a quest for meaning — and not just any meaning, but God’s meaning through the Bible’s human authors. Discovering God’s meaning may require hard work (digging for diamonds always does), but the journey will leave us with deeper knowledge, more Christlikeness, and a stronger sense of God’s beauty in his book.

Word Searches

Word searches are important for deep study of the Bible. To conduct one, search for a particular word throughout the Bible to help clarify meaning and make connections to other Scriptures.

A concordance makes these searches easy as they list words and where each is used in the Bible. Beyond this you can usually search Bible apps or online texts for instances of where specific words are found throughout the Bible.

How to Get Deeper in Bible Passages ..??

Arcing provides a way of preserving what we’ve seen with a kind of drawing of the text, each statement having an arc and each relationship having a symbol. When you’re done, you can file it away and remember everything you’ve seen next time you want to study the passage.

“Arcing is simply seeing how each of the Bible’s statements relate to each other

logically to find the main point.”

There’s nothing really mysterious about it. We talk this way all the time, especially when we’re trying to be clear and trying to explain something to somebody. We try to make a point, then we say other things about the point to explain it or support it. We do this instinctively. We manage to communicate pretty well from day to day.

What arcing does is force us to think about what we’re doing, and what the biblical writers are doing, just as a way of making sure that we don’t miss anything that they’re trying to show us. The great value of arcing is, mainly, it forces us to just look and look and look at the text and think and think about it.

Paul said in 2 Timothy 2:7, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding.” In order to get the fullest meaning out of a passage, we have to look at it carefully and in detail and think about it. Then, we need to reconstruct the argument in our heads, or on paper and write it down lest we forget it.